Hoboken’s middle-class families cannot afford to be distracted by GOP Chairwoman Diana Davis’ fictional characterization of Senator Robert Menendez’s record in her Aug. 5 letter.

In recent years, Senator Menendez fought Republican extremists to help the middle class bring home federal money for transportation projects to create jobs in New Jersey. Recently, he helped fast-track the start of raising the Bayonne Bridge to help keep thousands of New Jerseyans working.

Senator Menendez also helped young people by fighting to keep student loan interest rates from doubling at the end of June, and was one of the leaders who put us on the path to more affordable healthcare.

Now health insurance companies that could deny us care for having a previously existing condition are held more accountable to us. Just this month, 1.4 million New Jersey women now have preventive healthcare benefits as part of their insurance policies that companies were not required to provide before the healthcare reform law was passed.

Menendez’s opponent Joe Kyrillos sides with the insurance companies, not us, by calling for the repeal of healthcare reform. Joe Kyrillos sides with the wealthy, not us, when he calls for a 10 percent tax cut for corporations AND an across-the-board 20 percent tax cut, giving the rich a free pass in paying their fair share of the tax burden.

And it may not matter to Chairwoman Davis, but there are plenty of New Jersey women who don’t like that Joe Kyrillos opposes equal pay for women and men who do the same work. Nor do they like that Joe Kyrillos voted against women’s healthcare six times in the last three years.